


Pictures of You

by Mireille



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Written Pre-Half Blood Prince
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-02-24
Updated: 2004-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 05:03:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13780296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Colin doesn't take pictures of Harry any more.





	Pictures of You

Colin didn't take pictures of Harry any more.

He stopped right about the time the war ended, because pictures were there to help you remember things, and Colin didn't want to remember Harry the way he was after the war. If he woke up tomorrow and things were back to the way they ought to have been, he'd like to be able to forget all about Harry now, the Harry who shuffled when he walked and tried not to meet anyone's eyes and screamed at night.

He wondered, sometimes, if it would have been worse, if it could have been worse, if they'd lost. For Harry, he meant--he understood, of course, Muggle-born as he was, that it would have been much worse for him, and for the world in general, if they had. But if they'd lost, You Know Who would probably have killed Harry, and then it would have been over for him.

Harry wouldn't have come stumbling back to Hogwarts, covered in blood that wasn't all his, carrying Ron Weasley's body, or what was left of it after the Death Eaters had finished with him. Late one night a few weeks later, Ginny had told Colin that the Death Eaters hadn't killed Ron; Harry had. Colin had flinched, trying to think of some way to defend his hero, until he'd realized she was grateful to Harry for it. There hadn't been anything left of him, not really, she'd said, quietly, and it would have been cruel to leave him like that, to just wait until he died. Colin had hugged her, and told her he understood, and then he'd excused himself and gone into the bathroom to be sick.

Harry had stayed at Hogwarts after the war had ended--well, they all had. It hadn't been a school since partway through Colin's fifth year, when the Ministry had closed it down. After that, it had been Dumbledore's base of operations, and then... well, they'd still thought of it as Dumbledore's base even after Dumbledore wasn't there any more. And once the war ended, a lot of the people who'd been living there, if you called what they'd been doing in those last desperate months "living," hadn't left, at least not right away.

Ginny had been one of the first to go. She'd moved back home with her father, who'd become too vague and distraught to be left alone after he'd buried his wife and four of his sons, and all the things she'd talked about doing when she grew up (before the war, anyway; after it started in earnest, they all started thinking, even if not saying, " _if_  I grow up") got put on the back-burner while she looked after him.

Colin had stayed. They were talking about reopening the school next autumn, and Professor McGonagall had said she would allow those students whose education had been interrupted to come back. A lot of them didn't want to--a lot of the Muggle-born students had snapped their wands in half and fled back to the safety of a world where they could pretend that people didn't die in a flash of greenish light--but Colin had stayed, and over the summer, he'd caught up enough to take his OWLs, at least. (He'd got an O in Defense Against the Dark Arts, and had laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of having to take a  _test_  after defending himself against the Death Eaters for so long. It had been the first time he remembered really just  _laughing_  since the Death Eaters had broken through the Hogwarts wards, just before Christmas holidays the year he was fifteen.)

He didn't want to go back to the Muggle world, not now; he couldn't face his parents without Dennis. He knew they blamed him; they didn't understand that Dennis hadn't been a wizard because he'd wanted to be like Colin, that he'd been born that way, just as Colin had. But being a wizard had been the death of Dennis just as it had for so many others, and his parents had made it clear that they could never forgive Colin for that. So Colin had stayed.

And Harry had stayed, because where else was Harry going to go? The older Gryffindor boys had all moved into one dormitory by that point--it was less terrifying than sleeping in an almost-empty room, looking at suddenly-vacant beds and remembering--and Colin remembered asking Harry, the day after Harry had killed Voldemort, what he was going to do now that it was all over.

Harry didn't look at him, because he'd have to look in the direction of Ron's old bed, and Harry never looked that way if he could help it. He'd just shrugged--Colin had watched the way Harry's shoulderblades moved against the worn fabric of Harry's t-shirt, and wondered when the last time Harry'd actually eaten more than a bite or two was--and said, "Nothing."

And nothing was what Harry had done. They were alone in the dorm now; everyone else had either died or moved on. Colin studied, and worried about what things were going to be like next year--he could hardly imagine seeing the place full of life again--and watched Harry; and Harry mostly sat.

One night, Colin was going through his trunk, trying to find his gloves. He tossed a box onto his bed to get it out of the way, and pictures came spilling out--not all the ones he'd taken his first few years at Hogwarts--those took up most of his closet at his parents' house--but the ones that were his favorites.

It wouldn't have surprised anyone to know that they were all pictures of Harry: on the Quidditch pitch, in the common room, at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall. Harry talking, Harry laughing, Harry rolling his eyes and telling Colin to put his camera away.

And Harry--the real Harry, the one who moved through Gryffindor Tower more silently than the ghosts--came and sat down on Colin's bed, which had once belonged to Dean Thomas before Draco Malfoy had killed him, and started looking at the pictures.

Colin got up to sit next to Harry on the bed, forgetting about his gloves. "That's after you played Ravenclaw, my second year." That had been a miserable year for Colin; when he'd first come to Hogwarts, he'd already been smaller and younger-looking than most of his classmates, but after spending most of his first year petrified, he was not only scrambling to catch up in his classes, but he still looked like an eleven year old.

"I remember that," Harry had whispered, and kept looking. After a while, he came to a picture taken the year before, shortly before Ron's death: Harry, Ron, and Hermione, bent over a map in the Gryffindor common room; Harry and Ron were sitting together on the couch, and as Colin watched, the Ron in the picture leaned in a bit closer to Harry, and Harry smiled.

The Harry sitting on Colin's bed closed his eyes, going very pale, and his hand tightened on the picture.

"It's okay, Harry," Colin murmured. "I know."

And then, to Colin's shock, Harry had buried his face in Colin's shoulder and begun to sob. It was soundless, and Colin couldn't feel any tears soaking through his shirt, but Harry's entire body shook with it, and all Colin could do was rub his back and keep whispering that it was all right, that everything was going to be all right.

It wasn't, and they both knew it, but it was all he could think to say.

Harry stopped shaking in a few minutes, and he got up and drifted silently out of the room, and Colin expected that neither of them would ever say another word about it.

He was right; they didn't. But that night, Colin woke up to the feeling of another body settling onto the mattress next to him. Beyond the initial shock, it didn't surprise him to know it was Harry--who else would have got past the wards on their door? What did surprise him was the realization that Harry had slipped out of his pajamas on the way across the room, bare skin pressed close against Colin's body in a way that had only ever happened in Colin's dreams before now.

"Harry?"

Harry pressed two fingers to Colin's lips, silencing him, and Colin nodded. Harry's eyes were shut tightly, and the appearance of his face without its glasses made him look more naked than the expanse of skin from his neck down. He hooked his leg over Colin's, sliding closer on the bed, and Colin gasped from a jolt of arousal as he felt Harry's cock--hot and thick and hard--against his own.

Harry began to rock against him, very slowly, his hands on Colin's hips to keep him in place, and Colin found that Harry didn't require him to remain perfectly silent, as long as he didn't actually speak. Colin could hear himself whimpering, soft and urgent, as Harry continued his steady movement, the quickening of his breathing the only sign that it was having any effect on him at all.

Colin thought he was harder than he'd ever been in his life, his cock straining against the thin cotton of his pajamas, and he just needed to feel Harry, skin on skin--but when he tried to stop Harry so that he could work his pajamas down past his hips, Harry stilled his movement and pulled Colin's hands away.

"I'll stop if you want," he whispered, his voice sounding hoarse and strange.

Colin shook his head. "Just. My clothes--"

But Harry only shook his head in return, and began rocking his hips again, even more slowly than before, and Colin decided that this, frustrating though it was, was far better than nothing. He clutched at Harry, fingers digging into the skin that stretched tight over Harry's spine, his head tipped back. If he closed his eyes, he could forget about the vacant expression on Harry's face, could forget the odd detachment of Harry's movements. He could imagine that this was the Harry from the pictures that had been stuffed under Colin's bed, bright and laughing and alive, not the Harry who was less vibrant than one of the Hogwarts ghosts.

Colin's cock was aching, the slow slide of Harry's body against his enough to work him up to a fever pitch, but not quite enough to bring him release. "Harry," he whispered, arching frantically against the other boy's body. "Harry, I  _need_ \--"

Again the fingers were pressed to Colin's lips, and this time, Colin almost reflexively took them into his mouth, sucking eagerly at them, lips and tongue working the flesh like he'd imagined doing to another part of Harry, so many nights since he was thirteen. He smiled to himself, feeling Harry shiver, and then, mercifully, he felt Harry start to move faster against him.

It only took a few seconds of the new, quicker pace before Colin came, his hips lifting off the bed as he pressed himself against Harry. When he opened his eyes, still gasping for breath, he saw that Harry was smiling--although his expression was still vague, his features slack, and when he looked at Colin, he seemed to be looking straight through him.

Colin pushed those thoughts aside for the moment, reaching between them to wrap his hand around Harry's cock. Harry seemed startled, but he didn't push Colin away, just kept watching him with slightly unfocused eyes.

It felt awkward, at first--Colin knew what  _he_  liked, of course, but he'd never done this to anyone else, and it took a little while for him to get accustomed to the very slight signals Harry was giving him: the almost imperceptible quickening of his breath, the twitches of his mouth, and then, as Colin moved his hand faster, the upward jerk of Harry's hips.

Feeling a little more confident now, Colin began to vary his movements, trying some of the things that he liked and watching Harry's reactions. Apparently, Harry had been nearly as close to coming as Colin had been, because as Colin slid his thumb over the head of Harry's cock, Harry thrust upward into Colin's hand, biting down hard on his lip as he came.

He didn't say anything to Colin, only sank back down on the bed and closed his eyes again. Colin wiped his hand off on the sheet before curling up next to Harry--not touching him, waiting for Harry to indicate if he even wanted Colin to acknowledge that he was still there in Colin's bed.

Before Harry moved or spoke, though, Colin fell asleep.

When he awoke in the grey light of early morning, Harry had already left the room.

***

As the summer wore on, the school emptied still further; the people who didn't plan to stay on once it reopened in September found other places to go. Hermione was still there, but she'd taken a position with the school, coaching those students who'd forgot much of what they'd learned before the war, and she moved out of the girls' dormitory into one of the suites reserved for the staff.

Hermione was busy preparing for the term, and so Harry became Colin's shadow outside the boys' dormitories as well, silently trailing after him. He talked to Colin if Colin started the conversation, but he never seemed to have much to say for himself, and he always seemed to be focused on something no one else could see.

He slept next to Colin most nights now, and Colin got to overhear his dreams; he was fairly certain that what Harry was seeing, most of the time, was the last few moments of Ron Weasley's life.

Colin supposed, technically, that he and Harry were lovers, but that seemed too sentimental a term for it; Harry clung to Colin because Colin had time for him, would  _always_  have time for him no matter how broken and needy Harry was, and the sex was... Well. It was difficult to attach too much emotional significance to it; Harry wanted Colin to be someone else, and Colin wanted--

Colin wanted Harry to be someone else, too.

When Harry went to visit Hermione or Hagrid, or met with Professor McGonagall, Colin often dragged the box of pictures back out from his trunk. He'd sit cross-legged on the bed, looking through them, images of his life from the ages of eleven to eighteen. Harry was in most of them, of course, and Colin would watch him with a wistful smile.

He'd wanted Harry, he'd never wanted anyone  _but_  Harry; the hero-worship of his first year had turned rapidly into something stronger. But Harry had never had very much time for him; he'd been nice enough to Colin, really, but he hadn't even been Colin's friend, let alone his boyfriend (Colin winced, remembering thirteen-year-old Dennis elbowing him in the ribs outside Flourish and Blotts, and whispering, "There goes your boyfriend," a sympathetic grin easing the sting of the teasing words).

"Well," Colin said to himself, quietly even though he was the only person in the room, "he has time for you now."

Not even Colin could pretend that it was the same thing, though; the Harry in those pictures, the Harry Colin had fallen for, was almost an entirely different person. He was the Harry that Colin loved, and when he disappeared, to be replaced by this vague stranger, Colin had put his camera away for good.

He couldn't complain, he told himself over and over again. He had what he wanted. He had Harry, and he didn't think Harry was likely to ever leave him.

And all that had to happen, he thought, as he watched a triumphantly beaming Harry in one of the photographs reach out and catch the Snitch over and over again, was for Harry to be completely destroyed first.

Not even Colin could tell himself it was worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> [me on tumblr](https://mireille719.tumblr.com)


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